How not to be a scrub - Part 7 - The best deck - "Netdeck"ing is bad!

It has happened to everyone. Round 1 of a large tournament. You greet your opponent, shuffle up and present. You banter a little with him and everything seems friendly. You win the die roll, choose to go first and drop your Island, and then cast Delver of Secrets. Suddenly your opponents demeanor changes instantly. He gets red in the face, mutters under his breath and stops talking to you. After you handily beat him 2-0 in record time he begrudgingly signs the match slip and congratulates you on beating him with a lame "Netdeck" and the begins berating you as you put your things away on not building your own deck and playing Magic the right way.

If there ever was the battle cry of the Magic: The Gathering scrub it is this. Netdeck. NETDECK!

There are two major factors in Magic: The Gathering. Playing and deck building. You cannot have one without the other. To know how to build a competitive deck, one must know how to play. You must know how to play the current decks in the meta to be able to build a competitive deck. They go together and are not mutually exclusive to one another.

Before I begin, I need to explain a specific term. Deck tiers. The short answer is, the deck tier is roughly how good it is against the field.

Tier 0: Dominating. (Caw-Blade, Affinity)
Tier 1: The best deck(s) in the format. (Faeries, Jund, Delver, etc)
Tier 1.5: Great decks but auto losses to one of the tier 1s. (Mono Black Control today, Grixis Control vs Jund, Jund in Faeries land)
Tier 2: Solid deck. Needs work or is always a turn too slow. Can steal games. (My pet deck Time sieve when Modern first came about, always 1 turn slow)
Tier 3: Solid concept of a deck but the cards aren't right in the meta. (Right now, Turbo fog would be Tier 3)
Tier 4: Casual only. (A non-synergistic tribal deck)

I frequent the mtgsalvation.com forums quite a bit, especially the rumor mill. More importantly the developing sub-forums for standard. You can see a wide arrange of decks here. They hardly ever range above a tier 2. I see many solid decks, some excellent concepts and card interactions, some even give me excellent ideas (1). But you always see one thing in common with these threads. They don't play test, they don't refine.

Who designed Faeries? Who designed Jund? Who designed Caw-Blade? Who designed UG Madness? Truth is, if you aren't speaking about a specific build the answer is No one. No one designs these decks on their own. Every single one of those examples was designed by a team or the community at large. Each individual making incremental changes that better the deck. No one can say, "I designed Caw-Blade from scratch in its final form." It simply isn't true. In the context of Caw-Blade it was a team of several people who came up with the initial idea and the community who shaped it into what it would become.

The scrub doesn't understand this process. (True story here) In their mind Caw-Blade was designed by a single person with no help from the outside. Only the person who designed the deck could possibly play it and if you do you're just an lame net decker who can't play magic the way it was mean't to be played.

The truth is, building a deck is hard. Its more than hard its downright one of the most difficult things for an individual to do in Magic the gathering. Its so difficult in today's game, that the highest level players don't bother to even begin designing a deck anymore. They add on to an existing deck and improve it. While the team Channel Fireball may of brought Caw-Blade into the spot light in a huge way that year the deck existed prior to them getting a hold of it and improve it greatly. A couple of months down the line the magic community at large made even more improvements and continued its development to become one of the most dominating decks in a format ever. Even surpassing Affinity in terms of tournament play.

Lets not get into the other facet of the argument by saying no deck is original and someone else has come up with the idea before. With as many magic players in the world, and decks always being designed your original deck has been done before. Most likely not the same 75, but close enough the decks are the same.

In conclusion Net decking isn't "bad". The term is used by players who play the game differently than the competitive player. While in their mind they play the game right and you're wrong, but the facts of the matter don't hold water. No one designs the next Caw-blade on their own. Anyone who believes as such isn't looking at the bigger picture.

Play those net decks. Use them in tournaments. Make your community contributions to the list and further the advancement of Magic: the Gathering.




(1): For example when I designed Dredgevine at the end of the era Shards/Zend . Someone made some odd Jund colored deck trying to abuse Vengvine poorly, I then modified my mono-ish black dredge deck to include it, and eventually Blue for more card draw/dudes. After a week of constant play testing I came up with the deck. It was Tier 2, 2.5ish, and had its week in the sun. A friend of mine nearly won a 5k with it (he took it off MTGO daily results, ugh ;)